CardOverflow VS Flythrough.Space

I tried to build StackOverflow for flashcards (i.e. spaced repetition with collaboration as a first class feature.) After working on it on nights/weekends for ~2 years, I realized my architecture was shit. I started out with Blazor + F# + PostGres, but eventually I realized that syncing offline client DBs to the cloud was a very nontrivial problem. So I moved to event sourcing. Turns out that's not much better - I started to write my own IndexedDB wrapper, then said "you're a moron" and switched to CouchDb/PouchDb/RxDB. I also wanted to support plugins. I thought I figured that out with Blazor, but eventually I realized that more powerful plugins would want to manipulate the DOM directly. Blazor's virtual DOM kills that possibility. So, I'm off the dotnet ecosystem (I can't express how very, very sad I am to leave F#) and onto Typescript + SolidJS. I would've gone ReScript but that's tightly coupled to React which uses the VDom. Perhaps I should be using Svelte - I'm not solid on any of this new architecture yet. So my project has not yet entirely failed... I just realized I spent ~2 years on the wrong architecture.

The carcass of my attempt in dotnet: https://github.com/dharmaturtle/cardoverflow

FWIW I'm building something from the ground up that'll have this sharing/social thang built in. I also (obviously) think that there's a need for collaborative tools for building and sharing cards, along with perhaps ways to publish your progress. For various reasons I'm not building it on Anki though.

I'm building the above thing here: https://github.com/dharmaturtle/cardoverflow

Not only considered - I'm actively using it. You'll find people complaining about IndexedDB's API all over the internet. They're right - it's remarkably terrible. I'm using Dexie.JS as a wrapper over it.

I'm working on an open source edtech website. Prelaunch, but I wouldn't mind talking shop. In the western suburbs.

My dude, speaking as someone who gets really happy when they find a functor in their code, I fully disagree with your last paragraph. You can do FP without knowing anything about the theory. Telling someone that they should read up on a dry, boring academic topic in order to be a better programmer is kinda a nonstarter. When you start throwing around stuff like "You should learn category theory and homotopy theory to really understand FP" only drives people away - it doesn't inspire curiosity (in most people).

I'm working on an edtech thing - think StackOverflow/Wikipedia for flashcards. Basically, there's a way to remember an exponential amount of information - it just isn't popular because the existing software is terrible. Despite the terrible software, it is very popular among med students, since they have to cram so much info into their heads.

> I also hate that the anki shared decks web site does not encourage collaboration...

Dude, I'm building exactly this. I'm not basing it on git for various reasons, but I am using event sourcing, and git is basically event sourcing for code. My system will (eventually) allow pull requests, comments, upvotes/downvotes, and all kinds of community shenanigans on flash cards. It's months away from release... but here's the repo if you wanna have a look: https://github.com/dharmaturtle/cardoverflow

Here's another link that I recently saw about something related which is most likely not interesting for you. Just in case: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/nalar8/open_source_web_port_of_anki/ which is about https://github.com/dharmaturtle/CardOverflow

OK, found https://github.com/dharmaturtle/CardOverflow

Here's what it looks like now (planet files):

My project was a 3d in-browser escape velocity clone (think Endless Sky.) It ended up with an impressive feature set, mediocre graphics, not nearly enough world, no real game loop, and no players: http://flythrough.space

My mistake was building it totally in secret for most of its life. I worked on it for years focusing on adding features that maybe nobody wanted without validating the product/market fit or generating any buzz. By the time I was "ready" someone had gained way more steam on their own EV remake, even getting the author of Override to endorse it, so the fact that I had a working prototype didn't really matter, the community that I thought would be receptive wasn't interested.

I learned that you need to build something worth playing first, including some kind of game loop, before you try to get people to play it. Turns out noodling around with a hacky prototype isn't something people find exciting even if the whole community is centered around noodling around with mods and hacking. People won't mod a game they don't love in the first place.

Since this project, I've committed to building smaller prototypes and validating concepts before I go all-in on building something polished and content rich, and thought I haven't shipped anything this big since, I have met my personal goals.

Full retrospective: http://blog.eamonnmr.com/2020/08/flythrough-space-retrospect...

The conclusion: http://blog.eamonnmr.com/2020/04/dont-remake-an-old-game/

Here's a real example from a project I worked on in my homebrew ECS framework and later implemented in Godot: a guided missile.

In the ECS project the notion of 'thing that can run into other things and do damage' so totally separate from the notion of 'thing that is driven around by AI.' So adding guidance to an existing projectile wasn't too much of a pain. In the Godot project I'm dealing with networking as well, so the division is between fire-and-forget projectiles (derived from Bullet) which know about hitting things and doing damage, and AI driven Ships with AI or player driven movement which needs to be synced over the Network. In that case I had to copypasta the AI driven movement code into a 'guided' class under Bullet. That said, for almost every other task, Godot's composition first model has been way easier to work with, especially because it lets you test elements in isolation. Here are the two projects if you'd like to compare the code:

Homebrew ECS framework on top of the babylonjs engine: https://github.com/EamonnMR/Flythrough.Space

Godot with networking: